I've been writing about political economy and foreign affairs since 2008, first from Forbes' New York offices, then as a freelancer with the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting in South Asia, and now as a freelancer back in New York. I focus on the way economic forces--poverty, development, energy, natural resources, corruption, crime--shape national and international politics. What excites me is the possibility that an economic approach, by shedding new light on old problems, can point us to innovative solutions.

How much do you know about the gender pay gap?

To mark Equal Pay Day yesterday, the Department of Labor released a set of reports on the gender pay gap and what the Administration has done to address it. Most of the data replicates what we already know: on average, women earn 81 cents on a man’s dollar, but the gap widens as workers age, a topic I’ve explored before. Gender-based discrimination is worst for white and Asian women, but African-American and Latina workers face such brutal racial wage discrimination that they are ultimately the worst off. Interestingly, the gender pay gap is widest for those with an advanced degree, suggesting that discrimination is most severe in highly skilled fields, like finance and law.

The most compelling bit of the report focuses on a contest the Department recently ran for developers. The Equal Pay Challenge sought projects that took publicly available wage data and provided users with a tool that was both educational and practical, empowering workers to challenge their employers. The four winners were two mobile applications – Aequitas and Gender Gap – and two websites publishing data and advocacy about pay discrimination – Close the Wage Gap and Demand Equal Pay for Women.

For the most part, the winning apps are underwhelming. Aequitas is a database of wages sorted by job, location, age and ethnicity. You can use it to search for your job, and to make sure you’re making what you should be. Close the Wage Gap provides the same data, but adds a coaching component, “Ask For It,” where you can practice confrontations with your boss and hone your salary negotiation skills. Demand Equal Pay for Women is just a page of data, though its developers have done some of their own calculations on top of the public data, and the site has some good statistics: closing the gender pay gap, they say, would add half a trillion dollars to the consumer economy.

But the best project of the four is ‘Gender Gap,’ an iOS game that quizzes users about pay averages for different genders of workers in different fields, and thereby educates them. I scored only 5/10 on my first try, and learned that the gender pay gap in certain computer programming roles is nearly 50%. You can try the app out on the web (while it awaits Apple‘s approval), but be forewarned, the garishly pink website does feel jarring when juxtaposed with the sober message.

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